Wishing all of my readers a wonderful festive season.
Aimée, my seven-month-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel, will be joining in the Christmas fun this year!
One of the ornaments on our tree
Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas.
Thanks to everyone who has followed Cultural Life, read, shared, liked and commented on my posts during the past year. And an especial thank you to my regular readers — you know who you are. 🙂 I love getting to know you via the WordPress community.
The festive season is beginning — I love this time of the year, and I’m planning a blog post about the Advent and Christmas traditions that I grew up with.
What festive traditions do you have, wherever you are in the world? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.
Happy New Year to all my readers!
Ring out wild bells to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
Even though it’s the New Year, the twelve days of Christmas don’t finish until Twelfth Night on January 6, so I thought I’d share some Christmassy photos.
It’s the time of year for winter walks, when the morning dawns clear, bright and frosty:
A treat after a bracing walk: lebkuchen and a cappuccino, made using the milk frother that was a Christmas gift from my mother. If you’re a coffee drinker, I recommend that you treat yourself to a milk frother. It adds a special touch to a cup of coffee and I love being able to make cappuccinos at home now!
Happy 2015 everyone!
For Day 19 of Zero to Hero, the challenge is to “publish a post using a format you’ve never used before”. The slideshow below contains a photo gallery (a format which is new to me) of wintry pictures which I took a couple of years ago, plus a cento I composed to go with them. A cento is like a poetic mash-up, with lines from poems by different authors rearranged into a new, unique poem. For a wonderful example of a cento that the BBC recently produced as a promo for one of their channels, click here: BBC Cento.
And here is my complete cento in order. All of the authors’ names and the titles of the poems are in the captions of the gallery slideshow. In respective order, I composed the cento with quotes from poems by Robert Frost, Emily Bronte, John Clare, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
And fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into spring.
The winter comes; I walk alone.Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone.
Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.The secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
January was a great month on the blog.
I made some delicious soup (Honey-roasted parsnip and carrot soup), took part in a photo challenge (highlights below) and published the post which was Freshly Pressed, to my delight, on February 1!
I kick-started January with the First Thirty-one Photo Challenge, welcoming in 2013 with a photo a day.
Browse highlights from my entries below:
Resolution: to get outside and go places
Day 10: Gorgeous hand-knitted socks, knitted by a friend
A wintry photo entry for day 14’s “Frost” theme
Day 31: snowdrops signal the end of winter
I also enjoyed challenging my writing skills with challenges from The Daily Post
My dream trip: a writing challenge about traveling set my imagination on fire.
Another writing challenge: Starting Over, a short story set in Mexico.
Cultural Life celebrated the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with this post:
And on January 31, I published this weekly writing challenge post, about saying an emotional goodbye to my mother at the doors of the operating suite. It was Freshly Pressed! I don’t often use the word “awesome” but being Freshly Pressed was the embodiment of that word. Thank you to everyone who commented, liked and shared my post. Welcome to my new followers and thank you for helping to create a great blogging month here at Cultural Life!
It’s day thirty-one of the First Thirty-one Photo Challenge from Fourtuitous, celebrating the first thirty-one days of the year with a photo a day, and that means it’s the end.
Snowdrop flowers signal that winter is coming to an end and spring will soon arrive.
Snowdrops signal the end of winter
First Thirty-one Photo Challenge. Day 26. Theme: chill.
The chill of a winter afternoon walk in the snow.
It’s day 21 of the First Thirty-one Photo Challenge at Fourtuitous! Today’s theme: Flannel.
On a cold winter evening, few things are as cozy as curling up in a pair of soft cotton flannel pjs.
Cozy!
It’s day 20 of the First Thirty-one Photo Challenge at Fourtuitous!
This pair of boots was a bargain I found in the sales this month. They arrived a couple of days ago: just in time for this onslaught of snowy weather!
Boots
